The average of all the serious guesses in this thread.

This has largely been my experience as well. I work as a statistician and it seems like the folks who arrived at data science through a CS background are less equipped to think through data analysis. Though I suppose to be fair, their coding skills are better than mine. But if OP wants to do data journalism, of the sort Pro Publica is gearing up for, then a stats background would be better.

Probably statistics. A lot of journalists seem to struggle with stats so that could give you an advantage. You can pick up a lot of programming skills in a stats program. You can even lean into statistical programming if you want. I think you’d have to seek out the more advanced programming side of a statistical degree but it is there and I think stats is harder to learn than the coding skills you need for data science.

They are hard to read because they are written to explain concepts to people who already understand them. Handy if you just need them for reference. Useless if you are trying to learn. Which is why RTFM is often bad advice

Prenda law. A legal outfit that would seed porn and then sue downloaders for copyright violations. The idea being that people would settle to avoid being publicly humiliated by their porn viewing habits.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

Really, what you are asking about is called metamemory. Knowing the jargon in the domain might help you find more useful information. Neuroscientists have examined how the brain monitors and corrects error. For example, here is a paper that examines what regions of the brain appear to be responsible for error correction in a semantic recall task. In some sense, you are right, there are multiple parts of the brain working on recall and error correction at once, but you should really think of the brain as a larger system whose components work together in the same way the fuel injectors and pistons of an engine are part of a larger whole.

Not a youtube channel, but there is a podcast called serious trouble that covers legal events and provides a sober, detailed analysis of the law that is relevant to the cases they cover. They mostly focus on legal cases surrounding politics, but are also following the Drake/Lamar defamation case. I like it because a lot of the coverage of Trump’s legal troubles is characterized by hand wringing or wild speculation and serious trouble stays focused more on the facts and likely outcomes of cases.

Political hobbyists are people who consume political content, but don’t do anything substantive with it. There probably are MAGA types who are political hobbyists, but the movement in general is extremely politically active, organized, motivated, and effective across all levels of public life. They influence conservative politics through those organizational efforts. The MAGA movement came to power by leveraging networks of activists and voters to build political infrastructure that could be used to drive voters to the polls, fund candidates, coordinate campaigns and set the scope of policy, which they do very effectively. If you want to be effective you should be building political networks too.

Also, this is an aside, but political messaging is way less effective at persuasion than your comments here suggest. In practice this type of messaging tends to only reach people who already agree with it, and the persuasive effects of media on political attitudes have very weak effects that are attenuated quickly (Look up something called the hypodermic model of mass communication if you want to know more). Benkler, Faris, and Robberts offer really good illustrations of this in practice. By analyzing the spread of political messaging in news and social media networks, they show that most of the misinformation, lies, and propaganda that circulate through conservative media spaces do so because conservative media consumers want that content and punish outlets that criticize it. Creating ‘counter messaging’ is unlikely to be effective because conservatives would just reject the messaging.

I am writing this with the assumption that you are tacitly asking about US politics because of the moment in history. What I have to say will make people mad, but here goes:

A lot of the people on this webzone are what Eitan Hersh called “political hobbyists”. These are people who do not really take political action in their daily life despite voting or occasionally attending a rally. They may be well informed about politics, but being well-informed in itself is not really effective at changing politics. You can get on your phone and “rub the glass” to complain about politics, or to find people who agree with you. But outrage on social media won’t change anything, and if rubbing the glass and occasionally voting is all you do, then you are a political hobbyist.

Political hobbyism mostly functions as a consumerist approach to political engagement. A political hobbyist will passively receive news and information about politics, but will never really try to change anything, because to them engaging in a news feed is all they really do. That consumerism is painfully apparent here when, for example, posters denounce a Democratic candidate as being “not exciting” or someone they are “not passionate about” as if the candidate was the newest model in a brand of laptops that failed to zazzle in Q3. We see signs of political hobbyism again when political parties are treated as entities that are somehow completely separate from the public. For example when a lemmy user denounces the Democratic party for not doing what they want. “The Democrats need to do X!” Why are you complaining about that on the internet? You know the DNC isn’t reading these threads right?

If you really wanted to influence the Democratic party (which I think is the best bet for resisting fascism right now) why aren’t you lobbying the party? Why aren’t you mobilizing voter bases? Why aren’t you building political power in your local community so you can influence larger political organizations? Because its hard, because you don’t know where to start, because you are busy? Ok, but fascism is coming, and you are too busy to do anything about it. Or too overwhelmed to even try?

The truth is, if you wanted your ideas (and I am including here opposition to fascism as an idea) to influence policy, or what candidates gain traction in nomination races, then you should have been working on that LOOOOONNNNNG before the national candidate was nominated. Treating the Democratic party as a vendor that offers political products is a losing strategy for gaining influence. There will be an endless parade of glass rubbers ready to denounce the various political parties, but by and large, they didn’t do anything to gain influence with those parties. Their denouncements are ignored, they are irrelevant. My advice is to ignore the glass-rubbers. Identify one or two local issues in your physical area and try to improve them. What you should do is find a little slice of America (or your own country if you are not American) and try to make it better. Use those efforts to build up influence at higher levels. My goal here was to convince you not to listen to the glass rubbers. But my advice for resisting fascism is: Try to build political networks, try to mobilize local voters in local issue elections. Doing this will make your network an invaluable asset to larger (state and national) organizations. If you have a network of voters, of issue conscious citizens, or donors, larger organizations are going to want to leverage that network when it comes time for lager races. That gives you leverage. That gives you power. The glass-rubbers are going to tell you that is impossible. Its not. People do it all the time. The book I cited has examples of people doing it. Fascist conservative groups do it all the time. So why not you?

I will admit, this is hard. When I first read Hersh’s book I was offended, because when he was describing political hobbyists, he was describing me. But it did give me some motivation to think about politics from the perspective of power. And set me down the road of trying to do all things I wrote about here. It is early days for me yet, and I have only seen limited success. My work complicates things. I am busy, and often overwhelmed. But fascism is coming.

Not the op, but an obvious example is that in any post covering current events, there are always half a dozen comments complaining about “late stage capitalism” or denouncing the elites. Those comments don’t really add anything to the discussion and kinda just reduce a thread to a boring whinge-fest.

This is not that funny but I was amused watching it happen. One time I was at the DMV in a college town and a kid was at the counter trying to get his license renewed. From what I could gather he had it revoked because he was underage and had a DUI. Lady at the counter bounced the kid and a few minutes later, the kid came back in with his father and they were apparently from a rich family. Or at least rich by Ohio standards. When the lady at the counter explained that he could not have his license renewed because he had a court order against him, the father started in on the “Do you know who I am? I will buy this whole town!” routine, but the DMV lady was not having any of it. Both the kid and the father insisted that the judge did not have any right to take his license away from him and that it would be over turned on appeal so the DMV lady had to give him his license, because dad would make sure she got fired if he didn’t. But the DMV lady would not relent and issue a license. The father and kid were getting pretty animated, so finally the lady picked up the phone and said something to the effect of “Your kid lied on this form and is probably violating his probation, we can call the court right now and see what your judge thinks about that.” Which at that point caused them to sheepishly leave. When I got to the counter she told me that was not the first time in her career someone tried to do that to her.

Every “big data” data source I have ever worked with is already filled to the brim with low-quality, obviously wrong data. I have to think that is also true of the data scraped or collected by the big companies. I don’t think it matters that the personal data they collect is wrong, so long as they can convince ad buyers that it is accurate.

I went to one for a candidate for the House district I lived in a few election cycles ago, It was mostly stump speeches and other “rah rah we’re gonna win!” style pontificating. But one thing I did not expect and I actually found interesting was the house candidate spent a lot of time introducing other local politicians that were in down ballot races in the district. City council seats, education board seats etc. That turned out to be really useful, because it meant I got to meet/ hear from candidates who I either had no idea existed or who were just a name of a flyer before then. I suppose that experience may not transfer to a national candidate rally though.